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Two weeks after he was mauled by a neighborhood pit bull who freed herself from a backyard stake, a 6-year-old city boy is still afraid to go outside alone, his parents said.

By Claire Galofaro, George Jackson
Published: April 05, 2011

BRISTOL, Tennessee— Two weeks after he was mauled by a neighborhood pit bull who freed herself from a backyard stake, a 6-year-old city boy is still afraid to go outside alone, his parents said.

He returned to school Monday with stitches in his arm, scars on his face and an artificial tube inside his head to drain a split tear duct.

Though the dog was moved to a home some 10 miles away, the boy is afraid it will come back for him, his mother said.

“I want to be able to look at him and tell him that it’s never going to come back,” Diana Leonard said. “He told me the other day that it could sniff its way back here.”

Leonard wants the dog to be seized by animal control and euthanized.

The pit bull, named Patches, has no violent history, said Bristol Tennessee Police Lt. Jerry Smeltzer. The one time Smeltzer saw the dog, she looked as normal and friendly as any other, he said. By city ordinance, it was declared a dangerous dog, as is any dog that bites a person. But to be taken into custody and euthanized, a dog must have a pattern of violent encounters or one that resulted in death or a life-threatening injury.

The dog’s owner, Stephanie Gillispie, was cited for letting a dog run at large and having it improperly tethered. Gillispie, who is staying with an elderly woman who lives on Kings Meadow Circle around the corner from the Leonards, was not home Monday evening.

Ken Stevens, who lives in the same Kings Meadow Circle house, said the 80-pound dog is sweet, gentle even. Six children live in that house, he said, and all of them play with the dog without a hint of danger.

But on March 16, Timmy Leonard went over to the house to jump on their trampoline with other neighborhood kids, Diana Leonard said. The pit bull was chained in the backyard. His mother told him to be home by 8 p.m. and, at five after, the neighbor stuck her head out and told him he’d better head home, she said. He got down off the trampoline.

A few minutes later, Diana Leonard called the neighbors’ house when her son still hadn’t returned home. Her neighbor was wailing, she said. She screamed for Leonard to run over as fast as she could.

Leonard was later told that her son saw the dog was loose and started running away from it. The pit bull caught up with him in the middle of the street and pounced. A 12-year-old girl ran toward them, as others looked on in horror. The preteen grabbed the dog by the chain, still attached to its collar, and pulled her off the boy.

By the time Leonard got there, the neighbor had Timmy in the bathroom. Leonard said she could barely see his face it was so covered with blood. He had two gashes in his arm and the flesh was poking out 2 inches. He had a half dozen slices across his face and two bite marks on his side.

“It was horrifying,” his mother said.

They rushed the boy to the emergency room, where his arm was stitched and, the next day, he had surgery on his tear duct.

The dog, a white pit bull with a black spot around her eye, was taken to a house a few blocks away and chained to a tree, Leonard said. Sunday night, she was driving through the neighborhood and saw it back in the Kings Meadow Circle yard, chained to a lawn mower. The lady who owns the house, who apparently didn’t know it was back outside, called its owner and demanded it be moved, Leonard said. It’s now in a kennel outside a construction company near Exit 10, Stevens said.

Stevens said he once saw the boy poking the dog with a stick and he heard the child had aggravated it in other ways. The boy’s father, Steve Leonard, said he finds that very hard to believe.

Smeltzer declined to comment on whether the dog had ever been antagonized, though said that to justify a dog attack, it must immediately follow the provocation – a history of irritation doesn’t count.

Gillispie is scheduled to appear in Bristol Municipal Court at 8 a.m. April 14. Leonard plans to attend and petition the judge to have the dog seized and euthanized.

The Leonards have two dogs, both about 30 pounds, tethered in the backyard. But Steve Leonard said that dogs as big and powerful as pit bulls have no business being chained up outside.

Smeltzer, who oversees the animal control division at the Police Department, called tethering any dog a “necessary evil” in a community with such a gross overpopulation of pets.

“Pit bulls, the breed itself, has got a black eye,” Smeltzer said. “Society did that a long time ago. But saying every pit bull is a killer is like saying every German shepherd eats chickens. I think it has a lot more to do with where they came from and how they’re treated.”

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